When signing up for phone service, consumers with landline phones are faced with a choice as to whether the phone company record messages left by callers on their servers, or whether the user employ an at-home answering machine. There are advantages to both methods. With an answering machine, there is a very user friendly mechanical interface, the ability to quickly see how many messages there are, the ability to screen calls and listen to a message while it is being left, and the fact that playback is usually from a speakerphone making it easy to take notes.
Drawbacks to answering machines include the fact that the user can forget to check the machine to see if there are messages on it. Additionally, as the number of landline calls declines in favor of cellphone calls, messages are more likely to be stranded on the answering machine due to lack of use.
On the other hand, having the phone company record the messages eliminates the need for an answering machine in the house, allows for easy retrieval from other locations, lets a second caller leave a message while an earlier caller is on the phone, and in some cases, allows messages left by callers to be emailed to the owner of the phone. With the email feature, messages are more likely to be handled in real-time. Furthermore, messages are easier to manipulate once in digital form because they can be organized, transcribed and forwarded like regular email.
Several disadvantages of phone company-offered voice mail systems are that the user, depending on the type of handset, has to make the effort to pick up the handset to check for the presence of the tone signal indicating a message is waiting. Newer phones typically have a light indicator. But in most cases the user has to dial in to hear the messages, a cumbersome process compared with simply hitting a button on an answering machine.